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2015-09-28

Our book is released! “Hildur Stenbäck’s fiery yellow world of primeval rock – Portrait of an artist”

Together with my mother Maj-Britt Lind and my relative Benita Muukkonen I have portrayed the artist Hildur Stenbäck, who was also my grandmother. Read my preface below. You are also welcome to take part of the web gallery where you see some of the art and order the book.

Introduction and foreword in English below (translation: Nick Butler).

 

Hildur Stenbäck’s fiery yellow world of primeval rock – Portrait of an artist

The dark blue skies and huge seas try to penetrate the clefts and push right through to the heart of the rock. The cracks that widen to become clefts give the impression of being roots, arteries and nerves in the rock’s awakening curiosity about its place in the infiniteness. Man is here just temporarily and does not have the rock’s strength and reserves of comprehensive peace and harmony. For the clairvoyant though, man sometimes rises up as the water spirit’s mist from a gorge, sometimes represented by both man and woman in a peculiar dance ritual in a moonlit night, sometimes as refugees on their journey from a fixed point – or perhaps from the irreversibly lost – sometimes just as the tramp’s and the aristocrat’s staring faces in the rock fissures. Or as a mother and child. The child alone in life’s hardness. Or a bull in the rock, a fledgling, a dog – and the human elements, because they are the imagination’s expressions in the seemingly impenetrable, solidified material.

Hildur Stenbäck makes the rock open up and speak. Rock formations become friends in the low-key exchanges they have with us as a result of Hildur Stenbäck’s interpretation, provoking a discussion about the foundations in us, swept clean by the simple power of wind and salt water, and the groping of the cracks to find a new world.

(Valdemar Nyman from the exhibition catalogue for the Primeval rock exhibition at the Åland Art Museum 1974)

 

Hildur was a 20th century woman with artistic dreams, and she achieved those dreams. In the maledominated field of visual art, she learned to draw, sketch, paint and sculpt as a result of her purposefulness nature, which is typical of her home region of Ostrobothnia in Finland. She was eventually able to make a living from her art, even if she initially needed a side-job mending nylon stockings to pay for her materials. Hers became a lifelong journey of learning based on her thirst for discovery, which was of very contagious quality. She was the first woman to receive the Åland Island’s art scholarship and was also the first artist active in Åland to receive the state artist’s pension. Her art speaks for itself. Neither books nor art experts are needed to describe it, or to describe her as an artist. But she had a very interesting life. The nature around her gave rise to unique paintings which in turn have become special stories for their beholders. It is this aspect, like rings on the water around a reef, that we wish to portray here.

I was born shortly after the exhibition was held in the Åland Art Museum in November 1974. I was the ninth of Hildur’s eleven grandchildren, and more than 40 years later I still marvel at the layers, depth and humour, as well as the senses of present and future, in her oeuvre. Valdemar Nyman’s text about Hildur’s primeval rock, a theme that became something of a hallmark of hers, seems in some magical way to be about a world and a time that are similar to our present age; people displaced and fleeing while humanity is being both strengthened and impoverished, upper-class abundance, changing images of gender roles, and a child thrown into the jumble created by the information society. And while primeval rock is being blasted away to make room for people to create new structures, we actually need it to remain intact more than ever before. This is why a grandmother’s thoughts are important. And this is why Hildur Stenbäck’s creations will always provoke interest.

Ulrika Lind

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